In the two decades between 1929 and 1949, sculpture in the United States sustained what was probably the greatest expansion in sheer technique to occur in many centuries. (46)There was, first of all, the incorporation of welding into sculptural practice, with the result that it was possible to form a new kind of metal object.For sculptors working with metal, earlier restricted to the dense solidity of the bronze cast, it was possible to add a type of work assembled from paper-thin metal sheets or sinuously curved rods. Sculpture could take the form of a linear, two-dimensional frame and still remain physically self-supporting. Along with the innovation of welding came a correlative departure: freestanding sculpture that was shockingly flat. Yet another technical expansion of the options for sculpture appeared in the guise of motion. (47)The individual parts of a sculpture were no longer understood as necessarily fixed in relation to one another, but could be made to change position within a work con strutted as a moving object.Motorizing the sculpture was only one of many possibilities taken up in the 1930s. (48)Other strategies for getting the work to move involved structuring it in such a way that external forces, like air movements or the touch of a viewer, could initiate motion.Movement brought with it a new attitude toward the issue of sculptural unity: a work might be made of widely diverse and even discordant elements; their formal unity would be achieved through the arc of a particular motion completing itself through time. (49)Like the use of welding and movement, the third of these major technical expansions to develop in the 1930s and 1940s addressed the issues of sculptural materials and sculptural unity.But its medium for doing so was the found object, an item not intended for use in a piece of artwork such as a newspaper or metal pipe. To create a sculpture by assembling parts that had been fabricated originally for a quite different context did not necessarily involve a new technology. (50)But it did mean a change in sculptural practice, for it raised the possibility that making sculpture might involve more a conceptual shift than a physical transformation of the material from which it is composed.
There has arisen during this twentieth century (as it arose before, in ages which we like to call dark) a pronounced anti intellectualism, a feeling that both studies and literature are not merely vain, but also (1)_____ untrustworthy. With people swayed by this wrong (2)_____ that there is little use in arguing, either for history or literature, or for poetry or music, or for the arts (3)_____. With others, there is still faith that any civilization worthy of the name must be (4)_____ in a ceaseless pursuit of truth. Whether truth is (5)_____ through study or through the arts makes no difference. Any pursuit of truth is not only (6)_____; it is the foundation stone of civilization. The (7)_____ for and reading of history is one of those approaches to truth. It is only ones all the arts and sciences are such (8)_____. All have their place; all are good; and each (9)_____ with the other. They are not airtight compartments. It is only in a few institutions, subjected to (10)_____ misinformation, that events like the Industrial Revolution are (11)_____ entirely to the historians, the social scientists, or the physical scientists. Only within the past hundred years have historians (12)_____ that what people have done in literature and art is a part of their history. Books like Uncle Tom"s Cabin have themselves helped to (13)_____ history. Even at the moment, when scientific (14)_____ becomes more and more specialized and the historian concentrates more and more fiercely on periods and (15)_____, it is becoming more (16)_____ to the layman that all this is part of one whole. Even on a (n) (17)_____ when textbooks are being written to introduce to the theoretical physicist his colleagues who are working as chemists or engineers on perhaps the same problem, the layman is far enough (18)_____ from all this specialization to see the whole, possibly even more clearly than do the (19)_____. Between history, biography, the arts and sciences, and even journalism, who could draw airtight (20)_____ Not laymen. Is not yesterday"s newspaper history, and may it not become literature
A. occasion
B. spot
C. plight
D. dilemma